Icarus Labs
A group of (mostly) MIT students, alums, and employees that love aircraft.
Concept Video
Proof of Flight Video
Live Demo Video
Meet the team
Max Brand
Max Brand is a first-year graduate student at MIT in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is currently working towards a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering while conducting research in the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory. Max also completed his undergraduate education at MIT, graduating in 2011 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. While an undergraduate, Max was a member of the MIT AIAA Design/Build/Fly team for two years and participated in a senior capstone design class, in which he helped design a micro-UAV for MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force. Max also spent a summer interning at GE Aviation in Lynn, MA. His interests include aircraft propulsion, aircraft design, and systems engineering.
Anna Fung
Anna Fung is currently a Program Manager at Sapient Global Markets. She graduated from MIT in 2011 with B.S in Management Science. Anna has developed solutions for various problems within finance and worked in related fields such as wealth management, derivatives, and marketing. Prior to this competition, her experience in the Aeronautics and Astronautics fields was limited to one introductory class at MIT, as well as “Hey, it’s that flying thing that needs to keep flying when people travel. And land when it’s supposed to.” However, her friends and her passion for expanding her knowledge horizons played a big part in her joining this team. Her interests include piano, violin, knitting, and trying new foods.
Damon Henry
Damon Henry is currently in operations management in the aerospace industry. He has worked as a supervisor for a jet engine assembly line and is currently in operations fullfilment an actuator systems plant. He recently received his green belt in lean six sigma. Damon graduated from MIT in 2010 w/ B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. He’s held internships at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as well as at Comtech Aero Astro Inc. where he worked on micro satellite testing and design.
Kim Jackson
Kim Jackson is a graduate student at MIT in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Her current research focuses on designing intuitive interfaces for operating small micro aerial vehicles with minimal training.
Anjaney Kottapalli
Anjaney Kottapalli is a first-year graduate student at MIT working towards a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering while conducting research in the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory. Anjaney also completed his undergraduate education at MIT, having graduated in 2011 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. While an undergraduate, Anjaney was a member of the MIT AIAA Design/Build/Fly team for three years and participated in a senior capstone design class, in which he helped design a micro-UAV for MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force. Anjaney also spent two summers interning at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Palmdale, CA and one summer at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. His interests include aircraft design and systems engineering.
Justine Li
Justine Li is currently an NDSEG Fellow at University of Maryland, College Park pursuing her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering. She graduated from MIT in 2010 with an S.B. in Aerospace Engineering. Prior to conducting research in the CRoCCo (Cluster for Research on Complex Computations) Laboratory at UMD, she completed internships at AAI and Insitu working on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and internships in computation at Army Research Laboratory and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Adam Mohamed
Adam Mohamed is currently a Structural Design Engineer in the aerospace industry. He graduated from MIT in 2010 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. He’s held internships at Orbital Sciences Corporation and ATK Systems working on space systems, as well as internships at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
Jeff Simpson
Do you like airplanes?
Do you like helicopters?
How would you like an airplane-ocopter?
Jeff Simpson graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Computer Engineering. His focus was mainly on digital hardware design, with some software and analog design. He’s held an internship at Pratt and Whitney working in Mechanical Design. Currently, he is associate staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory working on the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR).
Karen Sun
Karen Sun graduated from MIT in 2009 with a B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science. At MIT, her primary areas of research involved differential methods in computational biology at CombinatoRx and machine learning enhancements for environmental forecasting with the MIT Energy Initiative. She was also on a team to build an autonomous land robot where she was responsible for image processing, path planning, and obstacle avoidance. Since then, she was a radar systems engineer at Raytheon, and is currently working in algorithmic trading at Two Sigma.
Eric Timmons
Eric Timmons graduated from MIT in 2010 with degrees in Aerospace Engineering with Information Technologies and Physics. Currently, Eric is a graduate student at MIT in the Autonomous Systems division of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research is in the area of model-based techniques for fault diagnosis and recovery of complex autonomous systems.
Jason Wallace
Jason is an MIT graduate of 2010 from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. At MIT, Jason’s pursuits included Classical Aeronautics, Airframe Design, Classical and State-Space Control, and Robotics. The summer after Jason’s freshman year, he was an undergraduate research assistant in the Aerospace Controls Lab designing 20gram flying wings for indoor flight. As part of a Flight Vehicle Engineering class, Jason became Team Lead for the Aerodynamic Analysis and Design group that designed the airframe for a radar sensing UAV under commission from Lincoln Labs and the US Air Force. Finally, a senior design project on the performance of vertical axis wind turbines led to Jason’s co-authored AIAA conference publication. Jason is currently employed at Textron Defense Systems as part of the Engineering Development Program, a 2-year set of four 6-month rotations between key groups within the company.
